Case Study on Vancouver Community Land Trust Foundation

BALTA has been researching and promoting community land trusts (CLTs) as a vehicle for affordable housing for several years. Through the efforts of Mike Lewis, BALTA’s lead investigator, on the Vancouver Mayor’s Task Force on Housing Affordability, the City of Vancouver was introduced to CLTs. Subsequently, Vancouver City Council approved support for a major CLT initiative to provide 358 units of non-market rental housing under the auspices of the Vancouver Community Land Trust Foundation (VCLTF), a consortium of non-profit organizations, social finance institutions and the municipal government.

BALTA hopes to follow the development of VCLTF and CLTs over several years as part of our proposed Social Economy Intermediaries and the Transition to Sustainability research project.

Recently, an initial case study of VCLTF was completed by Kristin Patten, a Masters of Arts in Planning student at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning. Kristin’s work was supervised by Mike Lewis, Penny Gurstein of the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, and David Lach of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC. Penny and David are co-chairs of BALTA’s Affordable Shelter Research Cluster.